WOODLANDS
by Oliver Rackham
Collins £25 pp623 Halfway through Oliver Rackham’s commanding book, there’s an engaging photograph of the author, “cleaving oak into radial planks with a froe”. It’s the only picture of him I have seen, but I doubt there will be a more revealing one. He’s standing in light snow, his face hidden from the camera, and drawing the mysterious froe through a plank tucked underneath his arm. A man for all seasons, hands-on, familiar with the arcane lingoes of both trees and humans, and completely absorbed by the minute details of the world.
I was lucky to be at Rackham’s debut, at a conference 30 years ago. He was a shy young Cambridge botanist then, and was addressing the seemingly uncontroversial subject of The Oak Tree in Historic Times. But his paper turned out to be a bombshell, a clinical demolition of foresters’ paternalism and an awesomely evidenced account of the fact that, for most of human history, trees had been regarded and used as a self- renewing resource. He described how he had measured all the main timbers in the original part of his college, Corpus Christi (there were 1,249, mostly small squared trees about 7ins in diameter), and calculated how frequently such a building could have been created from the renewable oaks of an ordinary Cambridgeshire wood. He blew away the notion that felling trees destroyed woodland.
In the half-dozen books he has written since, he has revolutionised our understanding of historical ecology. In sharp and exquisite English, and with a historical intuition as strong as his scientific rigour, he has laid waste the conventional wisdom of foresters, the ideologies of theoretical naturalists, the “pseudo-histories” of historians. His simple — and to him sacrosanct — precept is that the final arbiter in all arguments about woodland must be the trees and woods themselves, in all their dynamic, mutable, particular detail.
In the foreword to Woodlands he lays out his credo — that trees are not “merely part of the theatre of landscape in which human history is played out, or the passive recipients of whatever destiny humanity foists on them . . . (they are) actors in the play”, with multiple interactions with time, and all other organisms, including people — then concludes, disarmingly, “For good or ill, I have no particular theory to promote.” Well, if that is not a theory, or at least a manifesto, I do not know what is.
When this book was announced (honoured before it was published by being chosen as the 100th volume in Collins’s New Naturalist series), many of his readers wondered whether this would simply be an eloquent retrospective. But it reveals many new aspects of Rackham. The parish botanist, grubbing about in oxlip-coppices of his native East Anglia, has, for a start, become an international explorer. In Australia, he has witnessed the awesome spectacle of eucalyptus infernos, and “the nonchalant way in which the trees carry on growing afterwards”. Fire is necessary for woodland growth in many hot parts of the globe. In Japan, he treats the vernacular architecture to a Corpus Christi deconstruction. The five-storeyed Pagoda of the Horyu Temple, 80ft tall and “dated from tree rings to 670AD”, is built entirely of the rot-resistant cypress, hinoki. Japanese wattle-and-daub, still used in rural housing, is identical to ours — except that the wattle is bamboo. In Texas, he sees unplanted hedges developing spontaneously along the lines of barbed-wire ranch fences, spreading from clonal oak-groves called “motts” — one of which, he is delighted to discover, was described in precise detail in an eyewitness account of an 1831 gunfight between James Bowie and the Waco Indians.
More significantly, perhaps, Rackham has become more confident as well as expansive. He confirms his own past judgments on matters where it’s been proved right, and in all other areas (true to his investigative ideology) leaves open questions for us to grapple with. So, though Woodlands is, at one level, a popular introduction to his earlier work, and a justifiable celebration of its findings (the myth of the Great Wood of Caledon buried, Dutch elm disease revealed in Britain 5,000 years ago), it insists that we recognise the limits of our knowledge, which are partly due to the protean qualities of woodland itself.
He outlines the ancient origins of our woodland but has no firm answer as to why it was not the dense, impenetrable forest of legend, but, as fossil pollen proves, full of open spaces. Were they there from the start, eaten out by wild grazing animals? The result of storms and floods? Or Mesolithic peoples doing more woodland clearance than we give them credit for? He is persuasive about the long (until a century ago anyway) symbiosis between tree and humans, and argues that, contrary to popular belief, intense industrial use of woods didn’t destroy them, but helped conserve them, as valuable resources. Hence the continuous woodiness of the West Midlands, the Weald and the Chilterns. But what caused oak to stop regenerating in oakwoods in the early 20th century, what Rackham calls “the Oak Change”? It was quite likely a mildew, an immigrant from America. A turbulence in the fortunes of our national tree.
Rackham talks often about “storm effects”, and in particular about the ecological benefits of the 1987 hurricane, in its disordering of bland and uniform forestry lots. But I sense a metaphor here, too. A kind of storminess is what real woods and trees live with. They are not human pets or manservants. They are dynamic, autonomous, resilient, different. If there is little in the book about conservation policy, it is because this kind of respect for trees as living individuals is a necessary prelude to conservation. And if Rackham is a little dismissive of current enthusiasms for allowing wrecked farmland to evolve into wild “self-willed” woods, it is because he believes that intricate and irreplaceable systems of ancient woods are that bit more important.
Rackham is a Renaissance man, an ecological Sherlock Holmes. He is also a national treasure. No other scientific writer has so lucidly demonstrated that humans and woods are ancient partners of linked origins, and could be so again.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
Test Comment
Bud, Washington, DC
I agree that the author is closet romanticist (trees being "actors in the play"), but I would allow that, while he claims to not having a theory to promote, he /does/ do a good job of not letting any sort of "manifesto" dictate his work here. I might elaborate more at 52parties.com, but this should suffice. -
Nick Igluga, New York, NY